Queen Sheba's visit to the court of Solomon is a familiar story from the Old Testament;

It is probably not so well known that Muslims in various parts of the Middle East have their own versions of the story, as do pre-islam Ethiopians. In some versions, the Queen is said to have hairy legs, or one goat's foot (which Solomon cured), indicating that her tribe had the goat as its totem. In others, Solomon somehow tricked into having sex with him, whereas in the Hebrew and Ethiopian versions she went to Solomon in order to have his child - those who claim to be Solomon's descendants naturally emphasize his superior genes and sexual attraction.

The existence of so many versions of the story over different regions and tribes show that it was an ancient and important tribal saga, which passed down many generations before it was written down, often in "modernized" form; thus, the authors of Genesis attached the story to their recent great King Solomon, the builder of the Jerusalem temple, fixing the story to a much more recent era. The muslims' Suleiman is less definitive in historical time, while the Ethiopians, adding the rather dubious claim that Sheba's son too the Covenant home (why would the Jews allow this?), tried to authenticate themselves as the "true" heirs of Solomon through their story. Despite these attempts, it should be clear from the erotic nature of the story that it originated in early pagan days, within the common ancestral tribe of the Jews, Muslims and Ethiopians.

It is also not well known that there is a Chinese version of the story too: the suggestion was first made by some of the Jesuit missionaries to China in the early Qing era, and more recently by German scholar A. Forke, that the Chinese book King Mu's Western Journey, describing his trip up Mount Kunlun to meet Xiwangmu (literally Western King Mother, but more accurately Western Great Mother), was in fact derived from the same ancient tale of Queen Sheba.

Obviously, both Sheba and Xiwangmu were tribal matriarchs, and in the pagan times tribal matriarchs were also priestesses as well as fertility symbols. Given this, the two figures would engage in similar activities, including having sex with distant princes in the hope of benefitting from their good genes. Such similarilty of role does not necessarily indicate they were the same person. Nevertheless, the possibility exists.

The Chinese story, however, is so "modernized" and sanitized that the reader is not sure, besides dining together and reciting affectionate poems, whether King Mu and Xiwangmu actually had sex or not. The main reason for believing they did was: the very location of Xiwangmu's palace, next to Yao Pond, where fairies bathed and waited for men to take their clothes and demand sex, the ancient tribal fertility ritual, leads one to say "if he did not go there with that purpose, what was he there for?" While the answer is not obvious from the tang era colour paintings about the meeting

which, like the whole story, is poetric and romantic, the earlier Han brick carvings are closer to the story's true nature

Here Xiwangmu is shown with Fuxi and Nuwa, the legendary half human half snake brother-sister couple that founded the Chinese tribe, with their tails intertwined in snake mating, presided over by Xiwangmu. In the carving on the right, King Mu is shown arriving in his carriage laden with a gift pack, led by the divine green bird the emissary of Xiwangmu.